Microsoft pretties Office for business apps

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Time to spank MS...

As a developer I have looked at developer tools for Office and at best it's confusing, at worst it's a disaster.

As most know, Visual Basic is dead or is dying. Of course the problem is there are millions of legacy machines that run VB fine but not some of the newer technology like .net.

Dot Net is the answer? Not really, dot net now comes in multiple flavors 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and the soon to be released 2.0 (Currently in beta) The probability of a user having the correct dot net run time for your particular app is slim and trying to get users to make a 22meg + download so they can run a 300K application or add in is very hard. (Most just say no thanks.)

There is also the issue of how long dot net will be around. The new Expression suite doesn't use dot net at all, rather is uses the new Windows Presentation Foundation. Currently there is no Windows version that supports this. Vista beta does and there is a beta version for XP, but nothing tangible to work with at the moment.

Then there is the promised VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office.) Problem is it too is beta (unstable beta at that) and only supports Word and Excel at the moment. Also keep in mind, this builds code for dot net (You MUST have dot net installed on the dev machine) and no one is convinced dot net will be here in a year or two.

And finally, MS seems to have forgotten who the developers are. Sure it's great they work with someone as large as SAP, but history has shown they are not where innovation happens. Innovative software comes from the small shops, sometimes from one guy wearing all the hats. Ballmer keeps saying it is al about developers, maybe they would do well to listen to those developers...

Posted by: No_Ax_to_Grind   Posted on: 06/12/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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